Thomas Dekker, who plays the future rebel leader John Connor on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has been working out so he can kick some more ass in the show's second season (if any.) John has been somewhat kittenish up till now, because the producers want to give him an arc on his way to future hero-dom, and because it's hard to write a show with "three alphas," including John's mom and Summer Glau's Terminator, said Executive Producer Josh Friedman. More Sarah Connor secrets after the jump.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the story of Sarah Connor trying to protect her future-leader son and avert the end of the world, is "funnier than i thought it would be," Friedman said. "I think it's hysterical." Dekker clowns around, like, all the time on the set, Glau said. (This was easy to believe, judging from Dekker's antics on stage.)

Friedman wanted to bring back Kyle Reese, the time traveler who fathered John Connor and then died in the first Terminator movie. But his fellow producers convinced him this would never fly with the fans. So instead he finally agreed to introduce Reese's brother, Derek, played by 90210's Brian Austin Green.

Austin Green has a sense of humor about the fact that he's an unlikely (and unpopular, in some quarters) action hero. "When I think action, I think Brian Austin Green," he joked. "He DJs, he shoots guns, it'll be awesome." He takes comfort in the fact that even the most hostile fans have started referring to him in online forums by his character's name instead of the actor's, which means they're starting to accept him. "I'm going to come away from this show really honestly feeling like science fiction kicks ass," he added. "It's the first chance I've had to do it, and really, fucking praise the Terminator, it's been a great experience."

The producers of the Terminator TV show haven't given next year's big-screen Terminator 4, starring Christian Bale, a second thought. The existence of multiple contradictory Terminator narratives is fine, because even without the TV show you couldn't make everything hold together as one canon, insisted Executive Producer John Wirth.

The show's first season was shortened due to the writers' strike, but luckily next week's two-hour finale ends with a decent cliffhanger. And Friedman is lumping together his plans for the original end of season one with the planned second season to create a new second season.

Several people asked Glau why she always plays somewhat robotic killing machines, and she didn't really have much of an answer. She said her Terminator was similar to River, her character on Firefly, because both are "isolated in the way they relate to the world." But a key difference is that River uses martial arts, whereas her Terminator just uses brute force. So she's having to un-learn some stuff.

We'll see more of Teresa Dyson, the widow of potential Skynet creator Miles Dyson, again on the show. But not this season.

Glau is still hoping to create a ballet with composer/writer Joss Whedon, but she's not sure when it'll happen. "It was going to work out better when we were on strike. We wanted to do the ballet for years because Joss writes his own music and I do my own dancing, so i thought it was an amazing idea. But now he's been thrown into an amazing project [the Dollhouse TV show] and i have to go back to work. But we're hoping to do it this season. We're nailing down concepts," Glau said.